Les nécropoles de la Terreur à Saint-Pétersbourg et ses environs de la fin des années 1980 à nos jours

Abstract

In the late 1980s, work began to identify, study, and memorialize the mass burial sites of the victims of Soviet terror. According to official data alone, between 1918 and 1953 in Petrograd/Leningrad 58,000 people were executed for political reasons. A few sites of execution and burial have been identified so far, among which the Peter and Paul Fortress, Levashovo, and the Kovalevsky forest. This article is devoted to the history and analysis of these sites and their memorialization. In Levashovo more than 19,500 people were secretly buried, who had been executed or died in prison between 1937 and 1954. In 1989, city authorities declared this mass grave created by the NKVD the Levashovo Memorial Cemetery of the Victims of Political Repression. Since then, with the help of public organizations, more than 20 national or confessional monuments have been installed, as well as about 1000 personal memorial signs. In 2001, the society Memorial discovered the mass graves of the civil war in the Kovalevsky forest and placed a memorial sign ‘To the Victims of Red Terror’. In the Peter and Paul fortress, systematic archaeological study of the execution site near the Golovkin bastion has been under way since 2010 and has already exhumed the remains of 160 victims executed in the first years of the Soviet regime. But there is yet no agreement on the shape of a future memorial near the walls of the fortress.